Troubled Waters, Part I: The Klamath River Mess

First of a three-part series on the Klamath River Basin.

EUREKA, Calif. – In the gray light of late afternoon, Dave Bitts eases his fishing boat, the Elmarue, into the dock on Humboldt Bay and ties up. A winch lowers a big metal box from the dock to the boat deck.

Bitts opens a large ice chest and begins lifting out fresh-caught salmon, heaving the gleaming silver fish one by one into the box. In a couple of minutes the ice chest is empty. The box is winched back up to the dock, where it’s weighed to determine how much money Bitts earned from a 13-hour day on the water.

Bitts says he could have caught more salmon, but the fish are holding too far offshore and he had to spend too much time getting out to them.

“It was 10 hours a day of running to fish for three hours,” he says. “That’s a long run for day fishing. Normally you’d have a couple of tons of ice and just work those fish all day. With a concentration of fish like there was, guys like me would have a couple hundred.”

It’s a little after 6 pm on Tuesday, Sept. 11, and for Dave Bitts and the other fishermen who call Eureka their home port, the fall 2007 Klamath River salmon season is over. It lasted three days.

Things could have been worse – a lot worse. Last year there was no commercial salmon season at all.

The problems of Dave Bitts and other salmon fishermen in Eureka and other ports along the coast of southern Oregon and northern California didn’t start last year, and they didn’t start at the mouth of the Klamath River. They started 240 miles away and a hundred years ago. The Klamath Basin, covering more than 13,000 square miles, is an object lesson in what can go wrong when people start tinkering with natural ecosystems. And it’s a paradigm of what’s wrong with the way rivers have been managed in the West.

In September 2002, the worst die-off of adult salmon in the history of the West occurred in the Klamath River and one of its tributaries, the Trinity. Somewhere between 33,000 and 77,000 Chinook and Coho salmon and steelhead died, depending on whose guess you accept.

Fewer adult fish surviving to spawn meant fewer young salmon going downriver to the ocean next year, which meant fewer returning adults for Bitts and his fellow fishermen to catch in the following years. The number of salmon coming back in the fall of 2006 was so small that for the first time in history the federal government virtually prohibited commercial salmon fishing along 700 miles of the Pacific Coast, from Cape Falcon in Oregon to Point Sur in California, to protect those that were left, especially the endangered Coho.

Compared to 2006, this year’s salmon run was “better, but it’s still far from a normal year,” said Glen Spain, Northwest director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), which represents about 3,000 commercial fishing families.

“This was all predicted” in the aftermath of the 2002 kill, he added. “That affects the population three, four, five years into the future. 2005 was a miserable year, 2006 was a disastrous year, and we’re finally starting to come back a little bit.”

Fishermen’s organizations and conservation groups blame the 2002 kill on the Klamath Reclamation Project, a giant irrigation system started by the federal government way back in 1905 to supply water for agriculture in the Klamath Basin. Today the project delivers water to some 2,400 farms and ranches covering almost 600,000 acres.

According to its critics, the Bush administration made a politically motivated decision to let the farmers in the Klamath Project have irrigation water instead of following scientists’ recommendations to release the water downriver and help the fish. A Washington Post story last June reported that Vice President Dick Cheney – driven by a desire to help Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith’s re-election chances – had leaned on federal bureaucrats to reverse their position and give the farmers the water.

Cheney got the National Academy of Sciences to review an April 2001 ruling by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service and declare there was “no substantial scientific foundation” for their determination that holding back water for irrigation would pose a threat to endangered Coho salmon and two threatened species of sucker fish.

Klamath Basin farmers and irrigators, as well as the Bush administration, deny there was any improper political meddling. They also point out that a number of other factors, including high water temperatures and an unusually large number of returning fish, contributed to the disease epidemic that caused the die-off.

The fishermen and conservationists don’t deny other factors had a role, but they say low water flows in the Klamath were what tipped the scales.

The diseases that killed the salmon in 2002 are endemic in the Klamath, said Spain of the PCFFA, but “the fish normally are resistant if the water quality is healthy.”

“The biggest part of the problem was low flows that crowded fish into deeper pools of cooler water, and they got stuck there for week after week after week,” said Steve Pedery, conservation director for Oregon Wild, formerly the Oregon Natural Resources Council. “If nothing else, [releasing more water] would have raised the river higher so the fish could have dispersed. There were thousands of salmon crowded gill plate to gill plate. Literally half of the salmon run ended up dying.”

The 2004 final report on the fish kill by the California Department of Fish and Game appears to bear out Pedery’s argument.

“River flow and the volume of water in the fish kill area were atypically low” in September 2002, it said. “Combined with the above-average run of salmon, these low flows and river volumes resulted in high fish densities. … Presence of a high density of [fish] and warm temperatures caused rapid amplification of [disease organisms], which resulted in a fish kill of over 33,000 adult salmon and steelhead.”

The report also stated that the 2002 kill “was unprecedented in that it was the first major adult salmonid mortality event ever recorded in the Klamath River.”

If major changes aren’t made in the way the river is managed, fishermen and conservationists believe, it probably won’t be the last.

After the 2002 kill, the PCFFA and two conservation groups sued the National Marine Fisheries Service and the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which administers the Klamath Reclamation Project, and won a court order guaranteeing a minimum level of flows for fish in the lower river. That helps, Spain said, but it’s not a dependable or permanent solution.

“Because of our court action in 2002 we have fairly high flows, so we’re squeaking by,” he said. However, “It’s always a white-knuckle year in the Klamath because this is a dry region.”

Besides the recurring annual danger of another massive kill of returning adult salmon, fisherman say low water flows contribute to a chronic decline in Klamath salmon populations by fostering disease among juvenile fish.

The same diseases that caused the 2002 kill wipe out large numbers of salmon fry every year, Spain said, but those deaths go unnoticed: “The little guys die and get eaten. It’s not as sexy as having the big adult kill.”

And then, as if the salmon didn’t have enough other problems, there are the dams.

The Western utility giant PacifiCorp, which operates under the name of Pacific Power in Oregon, owns four aging hydropower dams – the oldest was built in 1908 – on the Lower Klamath. Fishermen and conservation groups say they reduce water flows, make the water downstream unhealthy and block access to spawning habitat. They want PacifiCorp to either provide fish passage around the dams or – better yet – remove them.

Removal of the dams “would be a tremendous step to restore the health of the river,” Spain said. “The dams themselves are an ongoing disaster. They seriously deteriorate water quality, they encourage parasites and algae, and they block somewhere between 400 and 500 miles of river that previously were spawning habitat.”

The dams are up for relicensing by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and their fate will be determined by negotiations in the ongoing Klamath River Basin Federal Working Group talks. They provide no irrigation water and relatively little power – less than 90 megawatts combined. But the farmers in the Klamath Basin like them because they provide cheap electricity to run their irrigation pumps, and PacifiCorp has taken the position that it wants to keep them.

In August the PCFFA, two Native American tribes and several other plaintiffs filed suit in federal court in Los Angeles to compel PacifiCorp to prevent discharges of what they claim are toxic algae from two of the dams.

Meanwhile, as talks and lawsuits drag on, Dave Bitts and his fellow Eureka fishermen wonder how long their way of life can survive.

There’s no debate that, whatever the causes, West Coast commercial salmon fishing is on a steep downward slope. At one time the Klamath River supported the third biggest salmon fishery in the United States, behind the Columbia and the Sacramento. As recently as 1979, according to the Institute for Fisheries Resources, there were more than 10,000 salmon boats working the coast of Oregon and Northern California. By 2006 there were barely 1,200.

A walk around the Woodley Island Marina, one of two in Eureka where the fishing boats tie up, tells the story in stark images instead of dry numbers. Derelict boats that haven’t seen a fresh coat of paint in years sit rotting at the docks, rusty gear lying on their decks. One of them displays a California permit for the 2006 salmon season – the season that never happened.

At the end of the day’s work a group of fishermen gather in a restaurant at the marina and talk about the past, present and future – if any – of their industry.

What’s really killing them, they say, is the uncertainty. Federal management policy requires that 35,000 salmon be left each fall to swim up the Klamath and spawn. Of the surplus, the four Native American tribes with fishing rights on the Klamath get half. Sport fishermen get 20%, and commercial fishermen get the other 30%.

From year to year, the fishermen never know how many salmon they’ll be allowed to catch. They have to buy their permits by the end of March and they don’t find out until mid-April how long the salmon season will be.

“You have an idea because they come out with estimates at the end of March,” Bitts says. “They say it’s going to be from this bad to not that bad. Or it’s all gonna be bad, but it’s three different shades of bad.”

Price instability is another headache. Currently, fresh-caught salmon are getting $5 to $7 per pound at the dock. At that price, Bitts says, “You don’t need a whole lot of fish to keep going. You might not get ahead or put anything away, but at least you can put fuel in the boat and pay the rent.”

But three or four years ago when salmon were more abundant, the price dropped to $1.25 a pound. Increasingly, Eureka fishermen are hanging on by catching other kinds of seafood such as halibut, eels and crabs.

Despite their own problems, the fishermen are not unsympathetic to the position of Klamath Basin farmers, who like them are at the mercy of unpredictable nature and unstable markets.

“I was at a meeting with some of the Klamath water users four or five months ago and it was illuminating, because their issues are very much the same as our issues,” says Dave Helliwell, another veteran fisherman. “Their lives are very similar to ours.”

Aaron Newman, the president of the Humboldt Bay Fishermen’s Marketing Association, is a comparative novice – he’s been fishing commercially for only about 10 years, compared to 30 for Bitts and Helliwell.

“You know, these potatoes they put on our table – what’s the price of a bag of potatoes nowadays?” he says. “They’re not making much money up there.”

“Some of them are doing okay and a lot of them are starving,” says Bitts. “Does that sound familiar at all?”

What the fishermen say they want is a sustainable fishery with an annual run of salmon dependable enough and big enough to keep them in business. But they’re not sure if that can ever happen, given the nature of the Klamath Basin ecosystem and all the competing demands on it.

Newman takes the position that the basin just doesn’t have enough water to supply the needs of both fish and farmers.

“There ain’t no way to compromise,” he says. “If you want a lot of fish you can’t have the farms, especially with the manipulation of the dams. You’ve got to have the available water when you need it. That water – there’s just not enough of it to go around.”

So does Newman believe there’s any future for the fishing industry in Eureka?

He thinks about it for a few seconds. “There is, but it’s gonna be based on finding a niche,” he says. “It’s not gonna be anything like it was, or like it is.”

“If it gets much less than it is,” Bitts adds dryly, “it’s not going to be at all.”